In 1709 the Statute of Anne created the first purpose-built copyright law. This blog, founded just 300 short and unextended years later, is dedicated to all things copyright, warts and all. To contact the 1709 Blog, email Jeremy at jjip@btinternet.com

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Thursday, 22 March 2012

The True Cost of Piracy: an infographic to set the discussion agenda

Though I've not seen it till today, I expect that the infographic featured below, kindly supplied by BackgroundCheck, has been doing the rounds and I apologise in advance if readers of this blog are already familiar with it. The True Cost of Piracy [now, that's a title which is a hostage to fortune] is quite US-flavoured. It's also quite eye-catching from an aesthetic point of view and raises lots of discussion points. Infographics like this always remind me of the diagrams of the human digestive system which I had to study at secondary school. From a didactic point of view, their lay-out makes them both easy to follow, and thus absorb, but also easier to dissect when criticising their content.

4 comments:

The true cost of piracy is, of course, zero. Piracy neither creates or destroys money. It may divert money from one industry to another, but if a penniless student who can't afford to go to the cinema has movie files with a retail price of $30,000 on his computer, the movie industry would have you believe they've suffered a $30,000 loss, when in reality, if piracy was somehow made impossible overnight and all illegal copies destroyed, the student would still be penniless, and the movie industry would be no better off... in fact it would be worse off, because in 20 years time that student wouldn't be tempted to buy the fance 20th anniversary reissue on whatever format has replaced blue ray of that movie he loved at uni, because he didn't see any.

If all the figures presented here are correct, then universities would be around $500,000 better off, and the IFPI, RIAA, MPAA and BSA would be around $30m better off if politicians did what 54% of the American population think they ought to do, and legalised private copying.

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